Yasumasa Morimura is a contemporary Japanese performance and appropriation artist whose work encompasses photography, film, and live performance.
24 Facts About Yasumasa Morimura
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Yasumasa Morimura is known for his reinterpretation of recognizable artworks and figures from art history, history, and mass media through his adoption of personas that transcend national, ethnic, gendered, and racial boundaries.
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Originally intent on channeling his creative energy into black-and-white still life photography, Yasumasa Morimura struggled to ascertain his identity and decided to visualize this inner struggle through self-portraiture.
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In 1985, Portrait, marked the first of dozens of self-portraits Yasumasa Morimura completed in which he adopted the role of established artists, major historical figures, celebrated popular culture icons, and identifiable subjects from well-known artworks.
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Yasumasa Morimura was born in Osaka, Japan in 1951 to father Nobuo and mother Hiroko.
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In 1985, Yasumasa Morimura shifted his attention to self-portraiture after he contemplated the precise nature of his Asian identity.
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Yasumasa Morimura has regularly cited the evolving lifestyle of the Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito in which he was raised to act feminine during the Shogunate's rule but later adopted a more militaristic image and masculine personality once he ascended to the imperial throne.
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Yasumasa Morimura noted that the Emperor's sudden change in appearance signified that this is an example of how easily one can transform their identity instantaneously through different apparel.
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From here, Yasumasa Morimura began to question if a change in clothing could truly make a person feel like someone completely different.
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Yasumasa Morimura created his first self-portraits in which he portrayed the Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh and his sitter Camille Roulin in 1985.
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Subsequently, Yasumasa Morimura participated with fellow artists Tomoaki Ishihara and Hiroshi Kimura in a three-person group exhibition at Kyoto's Galerie 16 in 1985, Smile with Radical Will, where he first exhibited his van Gogh and Roulin self-portraits.
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Yasumasa Morimura supplanting both the white and black female subjects with his male Asian body was significant for its subversion of a work considered a staple of the Western Art History canon.
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Yasumasa Morimura's art attracted global attention after he was invited to exhibit his self-portraits for Japan at the 43rd Venice Biennale in their Aperto section.
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From 1994 to 1996, Yasumasa Morimura produced his Actress series in which he portrays mid-20th Century American and European actresses and film characters situated in Japanese locales.
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However, Yasumasa Morimura did not only restrict his Actress subjects to still photography as he breathed life into his roles through both live performance and a short film.
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In 1995, Yasumasa Morimura had a video recorded in which the camera shows the massive Yasuda Auditorium classroom at Tokyo University's Komaba campus as students sit at their desks and prepare for their professor's lecture.
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Unbeknownst to them, Yasumasa Morimura arrives dressed as Marilyn Monroe and proceeds to run around shouting and gesticulating before standing atop a desk at the front of the room.
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However, Yasumasa Morimura digitally replicates his face to appear on each of the sunflowers' heads at different angles.
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In tandem with his art, Yasumasa Morimura was appointed as a professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design's International Research Center for the Arts from 2004 to 2006.
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In December 2012, a formal announcement revealed that Yasumasa Morimura was selected as the artistic director of the 2014 installment of the Yokohama Triennale art festival.
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Yasumasa Morimura debuted his first feature-length film, Ego Symposium, in 2016.
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Yasumasa Morimura portrays a diverse set of characters in an assessment of how Japan's identity is shaped by American culture following the end of the Allied Occupation in 1952.
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When he recreates subjects from paintings, Yasumasa Morimura replicates the precise surface details and brushstroke textures inherent in the original works.
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The photograph Self-Portrait: White Marilyn 2 is regularly cited as an example of this characterization as Yasumasa Morimura wears a blonde wig and white dress that is visually reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe's hairstyle and wardrobe while he reenacts her famous scene from The Seven Year Itch when her character embarrassingly attempts to hold down her dress as it blows above her knees.